Emphatic Polarity and C in Spanish - Lear

M. LLUÏSA HERNANZ
b. *¡Qué casa bien se ha comprado Julia!
What house well CLDAT has bought Julia!
And the same prohibition also extends to sentences with a preposed
constituent bearing focal stress, as in (65):
(65) a. UNA CASA se ha comprado Julia (y no un apartamento).
A HOUSE CLDAT has bought Julia (and not an apartment)
‘It’s a house that Julia has bought, not an apartment’
b. *UNA CASA bien se ha comprado Julia (y no un apartamento).
A HOUSE well CLDAT has bought Julia (and not an apartment)
The contrasts illustrated in (63)-(65) provide support for the view that bien
enters the paradigm of wh-elements. If bien and wh-operators behave alike,
targeting a unique structural position, it comes as no surprise that they are in
complementary distribution. Putting it differently, the illformedness of the
examples in (63b), (64b) and (65b) is consistent with the assumption that
only a single focus projection is available in a sentence (see Rizzi (1997:
290)).
4.3. The position of the subject
A further parallelism between bien and wh-elements is provided by word
order. Going back to the examples discussed at the outset of this work, note
that bien (like sí) triggers the inversion of the subject. Compare (66a) with
(66b):
(66) a. Pepito ha comido pasta.
b. Bien ha comido pasta Pepito.
Given that subjects in Spanish can easily appear in post-verbal position,
(66b) could be regarded as a case of free inversion, similar to (67):
(67) Ha comido pasta Pepito.
However, a closer look at the data shows that this parallelism cannot be
mantained. As widely assumed, 40 post-verbal subjects in Spanish are
interpreted as the focus of the sentence; 41 hence, the DP Pepito counts as
40 See Contreras (1978) and Zubizarreta (1999), among other authors.
41 Following Zubizarreta (1999:4233), I assume that word order VOS is obtained from a rule
that rearranges the constituents [S] and [VO], as schematically represented in (i):
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